Adobe's Flash technology has long been the bane of efforts to create a Web site or application that can be indexed by Google, Yahoo! or other search engines. What it lacked in search engine optimization (SEO), Flash made up in offering designers an infinite playground for creating rich-media apps, games and video.
But what good is an application that users can't find?
An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.
They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there's nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that's got you ahead of the game.
But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we'll be touching on more of them next week.
This week we'll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of "came with the distro" web development applications. Even if they aren't installed by default, many people try them first.
Our friends over at Microsoft have a knack for hiding really cool stuff right under our noses, and they certainly didn't deviate from this policy with their Visual Studio Express Edition line of products. Included with the programming and database tools that would make the layman cringe is an interesting gem called Visual Web Developer Express Edition.
While the other Express Edition products focus on programming and application development, Visual Web Developer provides a hybrid set of tools; its versatile HTML and CSS editing tools are paired with the power of ASP.NET to allow users to quickly build web applications. However, what a lot of people don't know about Visual Web Developer is that the ASP.NET development tools can be ignored, turning it into a very impressive website editor.
Visual Web Developer includes Visual Studio's powerful WYSIWYG page editor and CSS style builder functions. Also provided is Microsoft's developer sanity-preserving IntelliSense technology, which makes editing HTML and CSS a breeze by providing immediate access to things like common markup and style attributes and values. However, one of our favorite features of Visual Web Developer is that you can point it to an FTP server, and edit your website right on your web server without worrying about uploading changes or using a separate FTP client. In fact, Visual Web Developer can, for the most part, replace your external FTP client, because the Solution Explorer allows you to upload and manipulate files right in your editing environment.
All of the Visual Studio Express Editions are free of charge; they don't do quite as much as Visual Studio, but they are worth looking at if you're interested in getting started with software or web development.
Back before the days of FriendFeed, it was pretty common to see people post things like, "Just wrote a new blog post. What do you think?" to Twitter. That's a good way of getting your link out there, but if anybody actually wanted to answer your question, they'd probably do it in the comments, not in Twitter. Chirrup is a way of tweeting back at someone and commenting at the same time. A neat trick!
Installing Chirrup is as simple as uploading a bit of PHP or installing it as a Wordpress plugin. Most webhosts support this, and the HowTo on the Chirrup site has straightforward instructions for getting it working. Once it's set up, Chirrup will grab any replies to you that contain a URL from your site, and associate the right comments with the right pages. It also knows how to unpack TinyURLs, which eases character-count concerns considerably.
One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.
For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.
After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.
Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.
Since it was revealed that Apple's recently-announced .mac replacement, MobileMe, was partially built on something called SproutCore, the buzz around this hot new JavaScript framework has been growing. Although this is the first that many people will have heard about it, SproutCore has actually been around for a while, powering services like .mac's Mobile Galleries. Now it's getting so much attention that SproutCore.com has been unreachable all day, a week after the WWDC announcement.
So, why SproutCore? Daniel Eran Dilger, over at RoughlyDrafted, has a great rundown of things to love about this open source JavaScript framework: it will allow developers to build web apps that look more like desktop apps, function offline, and take advantage of modern browser features. Apple's using SproutCore to build a front end for WebDav and its own WebObjects, but other developments could easily add PHP, JSON or XML data to the mix, to name a few.
There was a toss up this week about whether it would be better to dig right in to the Linux HTML editors, or to wax poetic about setting up LAMP so that those choosing to go the content management system (CMS) route could test any changes they made with such editors on their local machines.
We ultimately decided to tackle setting up a LAMP testing ground. This will certainly not be necessary for every single person out there who just wants to put up a web site. If your site is not using PHP-driven content that interacts with or requires a database backend, and you just plan on designing static web pages, there is absolutely no need to do any of this.
If you are perfectly content to upload your site and integrate any supporting elements (once again, things like databases) live and on the web and make changes there, where it is possible that everyone can see your style sheet testing or things may be temporarily broken, you don't need to do this either.
Some people, though, really like to get things on their CMS tweaked to near perfection before releasing their content on the world. Other people need to know exactly what a dynamic site is going to look and act like before it goes live. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) makes this possible.
In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.)
I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux was that there wasn't a real Dreamweaver-esque type application. Times have changed, however. There are a number of HTML/web development applications out there that are free (as in speech and beer) and feature filled.
But I'd be really amiss if I just mentioned Linux HTML editors in a vacuum. There are a number of tools readily available in repositories that make coding, layout, uploading, and testing easy and (dare I say it) fun.
Because seriously, if it isn't fun, what's the point?
Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at web development tools in Linux. We'll do a run down of some popular XHTML/HTML editors, FTP and transfer software, and neat little tools for creating content that make some of the drudgery of "back-end" web work less painful.
One of the most valuable features of any good email or IM service is the contact list. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that provide online communication tools also give you a place to store information about your friends, family, colleagues, and people who you met years ago and have completely forgotten about.
Yahoo! is making that much more useful by launching the Yahoo! Address Book API, which will let 3rd party developers create applications that can interact with your contact list. For example, you can use the API to develop an application that will scan your contact list to find other users who already belong to the social network you're signing up for, or a list of people you may want to invite. The API also supports contact synchronization, which could come in handy if you want to develop a tool that syncs online contact lists with Outlook or Thunderbird.
The API also provides the ability to create, modify, or delete contact information, which sounds a litle scary. But Yahoo! says write-acess is "available on a case by case basis," so developers will need to contact Yahoo! before creating a utility that has the ability to wipe out your address book.
Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using the API for a while, but Yahoo! is launching it publicly today.
At any given time on the planet, there's a technology trade show in progress. Some are more significant than others, and there's no formula to figure if any given one will be worth the airfare. We're guessing that a few ultraportable laptop manufacturers, as well as a few of us (cough) normal folk, are a little intrigued with the news emerging from the Computex exhibit halls today.
Canonical let slip some further information and screen shots of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the Ubuntu derived operating system for ultraportables. The quick and dirty information: it looks suspiciously as if the Ubuntu image is made to work solely on Intel Atom processors. How radically different is that from the other Intel processors used previously in ultraportables? Will it be a significant enough difference that it won't run with other Intel chips? Are VIA machines left in the dust? Maybe, maybe not, but we're guessing it'll affect performance on some level.
It seems that Canonical and Intel are working with various manufacturers to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix into our hot little hands, but it probably won't happen much before late 2008. They were so kind, however, as to release some screenshots of the demo version.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix looks... well, a little bit like the "Easy Mode" settings in the Eee PC's customized Xandros. Maybe not quite as simplistic, but we have this funny feeling that many people picturing "Ubuntu on an ultraportable" were thinking more along the lines of the traditional look with a few GUI tweaks. We're not sure if this is really a good or bad thing, as yet. Ultraportables are different animals, and used in a different manner than a desktop. Perhaps a different looking user interface is enough of a disconnect to make it all work (and keep us from trying to install the sorts of things on our ultraportables that they aren't intended to run due to processing limitations).
What will be interesting, and promises to push Linux on ultraportables to the next level, is all that scary stuff on the backend. The most intriguing bit of this conversation seems to focus on the use of Moblin, and the push for developers to get Ubuntu packages to work well -- really well -- with the specific requirements of the processor and ultraportable hardware.
Web developer Aza Raskin knows we visit Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Facebook without even having to ask.
No, he isn't employing privacy violating hackery, but he is exploiting a "cute" information leak in CSS that traditionally displays visited links differently than those that have yet to be visited. By loading in an iframe a list of social site URLs to see which are purple (visited) and blue (not visited), an assumption can be made on what sites to prompt users for submitting a story or blog entry.
Raskin has wrapped this functionality in a script called SocialHistory.js.
Yahoo! Fire Eagle got a lot of attention when it launched back in March, and for good reason: a cross-platform system for building location data into an application? The buzz died down, though, because there weren't any cool applications using Fire Eagle. That's changing now, though, as the first wave of Fire Eagle stuff rolls out. Metosphere for the iPhone is one of the best of this bunch.
Metosphere has several uses. Like any app that takes advantage of Fire Eagle, it can update your location using your GPS or a WiFi hotspot. It also shows you nearby events on Eventful and Upcoming, and nearby Wikipedia pages. There's a map that shows you all of this, plus meetups, emergency alerts, and the best part: messages and geocaches you can create directly from Metosphere. There's no signup required, just use your existing Yahoo! ID.
Geocaching is going to be a big deal very soon, and Metosphere is a great way to play with it on a platform you already know how to use. Show it to your friends and leave each other messages at your favorite hangouts, or start a city-wide scavenger hunt. We'll keep covering new Fire Eagle tools as they advance -- that monthly renewal email is a good reminder to see what developers have been working on.
UPDATE: E.W. Scripps SEM Manager Paul Petersen weighs in on the SEO impact of Adobe and Google's announcement.
An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text. 
There was a toss up this week about 
Web developer 
